The use of Phillips compact cassettes and Olympus microcassettes has expanded. Accordingly magnetic recording media, particularly, audio recording tape, has recently become very popular and has been used for recording music. Music tapes are required to have the following properties: (1) it has substantially flat frequency characteristics in an audible range of from 20 Hz to 20 KHz; (2) it has a maximum output level (MOL) high enough to reproduce undistorted high level sound; and (3) it has a noise level such as a bias noise level low enough not to overwhelm weak sound. To satisfy these requirements, various types of tapes have been developed for use in Phillips compact cassettes. Examples of such tapes include normal position tape (Type I), CrO.sub.2 position tape (Type II), Fe-Cr position tape (Type III) and metal position tape (Type IV). However, with the exception of normal position tape, these tapes are expensive and must be used with a bias equalizer that differs from what is used with the normal position tape. Therefore, in order to develop a normal position tape having better hi-fi characteristics, studies on various binders and fine ferromagnetic particles have been made. However, it is fairly difficult to produce a normal position tape that meets the above mentioned requirements and which has good hi-fi characteristics.